Lord's tribute was celebration of Harold Pinter's two great loves: cricket and literature

Harold Pinter appeared on many of the greatest stages. Now he can add one more. Last Sunday, while friends and team-mates paid tribute to him in words and songs at Lord's, his portrait stood in the Long Room.

Fitting tribute: Harold Pinter life was celebrated by friends from the literary and sporting world at Lord's on SundayPhoto: PA

By Ed Smith

6:49PM BST 02 Oct 2009

The picture, showing him making a fine off-drive, was given to Pinter by his team-mates at the Gaieties Cricket Club. "On the evidence of this painting," Pinter told the artist Joe Hill, "I should have opened the batting for England!"

How well Pinter looked in that company. Just behind him on the Long Room wall, peering out on to the evening autumn sunshine, sat Sir Donald Bradman and Pinter's great hero, Sir Len Hutton. What a triumvirate of voice and willpower – and each, you sensed, aware of the other.

That theme ran through Sunday's tribute to Pinter: cricket and literature, those two great allies, each enhanced and enlightened by a shared respect for the other.

We should always try to resist lazy cricketing exceptionalism. But on Sunday it was impossible to avoid the feeling that only cricket, perhaps only English cricket, could bring together such a distinguished cast – including Sir Peter Hall, Jeremy Irons, Sam West, Mike Brearley and Mike Atherton – to celebrate the life of a great playwright.

Most sports, condensed into 80 or 90 minutes, have space only to develop one narrative theme. It may be thrilling, but it is rarely complex. Cricket, on the other hand, spread over a whole day – or five days – invites a complex web of narrative threads. Not only do we not know how the stories will end, we do not know which of the stories will matter.

It has been said of Pinter, who sadly lost his fight against illness and died Dec 24 2008 that his genius lay in his ability to find poetry in everyday speech.

Cricket, too, suddenly throws up an absorbing duel in the middle of a quiet day, or conjures an unexpected climax from a flat game.

Even cricket's longueurs have a place. Two great friends watching a match together have no fear of a boring draw: friendship fills the spaces.

There was no danger of a boring draw on Sunday. The day began with a cricket match between the Lord's Taverners and the Gaieties, the travelling team that Pinter captained and loved. Nor was it a case of jazz-hat fooling around. It took two England captains – Mike Atherton and Mike Gatting – to get through a searching Gaieties new-ball attack, before both fell to brilliant catches. A lightning stumping quickly accounted for this columnist.

Pinter was a keen batsman. But he confessed to having only two strengths: a doughty defence and the ability to hit powerful sixes. So it was appropriate that the game ended with a huge six into the Wellington Road – in the last over – and a Gaieties win.

If the cricket match took the theatre on to the sports field, the evening led the arts into the Long Room. About a hundred people were lucky enough to watch Pinter's friends and colleagues perform his poems and extracts from his plays.

Irons and Timothy West put on a marvellous scene from No Man's Land.

Finstan McKeown, Jason Isaacs and West took us straight into the dark, physical, intimidating world of The Birthday Party.

There was lightness, too. Mike Gatting and Brearley – two captains of Middlesex, two captains of England – have orchestrated many great performances at Lord's, but never before, surely, have they acted out a scene from The Caretaker.

We heard Pinter, himself, in three excerpts from an interview on Test Match Special with Brian Johnston. The two voices circled each other warily, opposites in so many ways, but united by a boyish love of cricket. Pinter told a typical story about captaincy. Criticised by a Gaieties team-mate about a bowling change, he resigned on the spot. "You're now the captain," he said to his critic.

Like a great cricket match, or a fine play, it was a hard day to sum up. It was, for me, a rare privilege to watch great men walk in different shoes, to feel the strength of a writer's voice, to sense how much he was loved, to reflect on the enduring power of a game.

One Gaieties player said they wanted the evening to feel as if they had "run a portrait of Harold up the flagpole of the Long Room".

You felt he would have been proud – proud of the match, proud of the whole day.

Intimate, surprising and darkly funny: we were, after all, celebrating the words and passions of Harold Pinter.